Malcolm Gladwell created the 10,000 hour rule with the theory that excellence in any skill requires 10,000 hours of practice. In most areas of life this is the norm. If you do the math, 40 hours a week for 50 weeks in one year would be 2,000 hours. After 5 years you have 10,000 hours, you have excellence.
Sadly, this is absent from the martial arts industry. Almost nobody does martial arts 40 hours each week. Even fewer teach that much. When I first started, I noticed that none of my instructors taught with any frequency. I believed that it was just an inherent thing in all martial arts. Then I began to question it with the thought that just because I’ve never seen it done, doesn’t mean that it’s impossible.
Little by little I added classes to my schedule and learned how to do them efficiently. I came to the understanding that most of the instructors in my industry, despite being great martial artists, have no idea how to actually teach. I ended up using teaching practices from outside the industry and really learning how people learn and how to effectively communicate information to them.
10,000 hours was a big deal for me. I felt like my students deserved excellence and that I shouldn’t ask it of them if I wasn’t trying for it myself. It is a goal that few people will get and even fewer will ever try. It took me 12 years, 6 months, 3 weeks, and 1 day to achieve. That’s an average of about 800 hours a year, 66.7 hours a month, 15 hours a week, or 2.2 hours a day. It’s the same as having taught 4 hours a week for a little over 48 years. While working towards 10,000 hours, I taught 6 classes in one day 95 times and 7 classes in a day 12 times. This was also on top of my own training and working out.
I’m not some athletic physical specimen of peak conditioning. If I can do this, then there’s no reason why anyone in the martial arts industry can’t. Often the first person to tell you that you can’t do something is you! The second is probably physics. You can do anything any other person can as long as you try hard enough. Afterall, isn’t that the very definition of Kung Fu.
